Tag Archives: Tennessee

Billy Irick, 59, who had spent more than three decades on death row, was put to death at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Tylee Tracer said. Pronounced dead at 7:48 p.m. Central time, he became the 15th inmate executed this year in the United States and the first in Tennessee since 2009. Irick had been a boarder in the home where the girl lived with her mother, stepfather and siblings.

Tennessee has carried out its first execution in nearly a decade using a controversial cocktail of drugs including a lethal ingredient described by the Supreme Court as “chemically burning at the stake”. Billy Ray Irick, an inmate convicted of the 1985 rape and murder of seven-year-old Paula Dyer, received a three-drug injection on Thursday night after the US Supreme Court denied a final request to stay his execution. The lethal injection consisted of midazolam, used as sedative during an execution, a muscle-relaxer called vecuronium bromide, and compounded potassium chloride, the agent that stops the heart.

The US state of Tennessee on Thursday used a controversial lethal injection procedure to execute a man who was convicted of raping and killing a child, after the nation’s top court declined his final bid for a stay. Irick was the first inmate to be executed in Tennessee since 2009.

The decision cleared the path for the lethal injection and came just hours before the state was scheduled to put to death Billy Irick, 59, at 7 p.m. CDT (0000 GMT) at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The execution would be the first in the state since 2009 and the 15th this year in the United States. Lawyers for Irick, who has been on death row more than three decades, said he has suffered from psychosis for his entire life and putting him to death would violate legal norms barring the execution of people with severe mental disorders or disabilities.

The decision cleared the path for the lethal injection and came just hours before the state was scheduled to put to death Billy Irick, 59, at 7 p.m. CDT (0000 GMT) at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The execution would be the first in the state since 2009 and the 15th this year in the United States. Lawyers for Irick, who has been on death row more than three decades, said he has suffered from psychosis for his entire life and putting him to death would violate legal norms barring the execution of people with severe mental disorders or disabilities.